Thursday, March 24, 2005

Benjamin Jones' Art: A Review of His Drawings in New American Paintings #52

The most important quality for a work of art to have is the ability to move us, to make us feel.By this standard Benjamin Jones drawings in the series New American Paintings, issue #52, succeed.

The most moving of the three works depicted is Leaving Behind, executed in 2003. In it a crudely drawn black and white stick figure contemplates a prone cartoonish teddy bear-like figure.

Contrasted with the contemplating figure, the teddy bear is drawn in color, a yellow body, one ear colored blue and red, the other brown and red.

Also in contrast to the contemplating figure, the teddy bear has, however crudely drawn, arms and toes on his feet.

The contemplating figure is little more than a head. There is no hair and just dots for ears and a nose. It has no arms, is dressed in a black variegated tunic with no hint of an underlying body and its feet are drawn as child-like, stick-figure clubs.

Significantly Mr. Jones has articulated the eyes of the figures, the proverbial windows of the soul. The contemplating figure is looking at the teddy bear and looking back at his childhood or perhaps at a child-like innocence lost, a state when he was more than a "brain in a vat," to a time when he was more complete and had arms and hands and fingers and toes and useful ears.

There is a bit of a sorrowful look on the contemplator's face but mostly it is a look of contemplation from a distance, of acceptance, but acknowledgment of loss.

In between these two figures is a disembodied head at the feet of the contemplator. There is no mistaking the look of anguish on the face of this head. It is drawn in the style and in the black and white spareness of the contemplating figure and so can be taken to be the contemplator at a slightly earlier period in life. The grief of the disembodied head is also what the contemplator has left behind, in addition to the teddy bear innocence.

The mouths of all three figures are clearly articulated and the teeth are aggressively portrayed. This aspect of the drawing does not work. There should be nothing of ambiguous intent in the depiction of bared teeth. They are universally recognized as a symbol of aggression, but here they are drawn alike on all three figures, one that is smiling (the teddy bear), one that is grieving, one that is contemplating. Teeth-baring aggression is not what is being left behind in Leaving Behind.

If Mr. Jones meant instead to convey the pain of words by the frightful teeth, that intent also is not realized, not the least because the symbolism of bared teeth without more does not convey the one-step-removed pain of words issuing from sharp-toothed mouths.

Mr. Jones has drawn this moving scene against an empty off-white paper background that enhances the dramatic effect of the theme by not distracting the viewer by superfluity. In this way, the drawing is reminiscent of those striking Chinese portraits done even more sparingly with fine tip against a bare background that is overwhelming in its emptiness.

Mr. Jones' skill in movingly expressing his feelings has already gained him recognition. According to his c.v. his work is displayed in several museums, including the Whitney in New York.

It is hoped that Mr. Jones, possessing the preeminent quality of artistic greatness, is dedicated and ambitious enough to generalize from the particular, that is to connect his soul to the condition of his fellows, to society's, to mankind's. That would be ambition indeed.

However, in the brief summary on his biography page in New American Painting, Mr. Jones writes, inter alia, the following:

.....isolation......not invited....exiled.....apart....

__

.....BAMBI.....choice+no choice.....cage.....freedom lost.....jail

__

.....Pavarotti's NESSUN DORMA.....

__

.....Capote's A CHRISTMAS MEMORY.....

__

.....CHINA.....

And so on. That kind of Rorschach test/word association summary of his life is (1) revealing of deep feeling and manifold experience, and (2) revealing of his lack of generalizing from those particular emotions and experiences, of not bringing them together into a coherent whole, or at least, wholes.

This disjointedness is apparent in Leaving Behind. The figures stand against an empty background, away from anything--history, society--that is larger than the self.

There is also no connection between Mr. Jones' art and the art of this time. There is no expression of how art history has informed his work, of how he got to this point as an artist. Again, it is conceded that this is to judge Mr. Jones' art by a very ambitious standard. The three paintings in N.A.P #52 are in every way indicative of an artist who lives and works apart. Connecting his disconnectedness would take Mr. Jones art beyond where it is now.

There is also no indication of Mr. Jones ability to draw or paint in his three N.A.P. works. If he possesses such ability and has just eschewed it in these works for effect that is one thing, the efficacy of which itself can be debated, but if he hasn't that ability it would be nonsense to say that that lack doesn't matter in evaluating a work of art. It certainly is not fatal but painting is non-verbal expression and clearly the impact of that expression can be enhanced or detracted by artistic skill. Can Mr. Jones draw?

He can express himself movingly. That alone makes his art worthwhile and stand out against much of the background of his contemporaries.

Benjamin Jones' art can be seen in the Whitney Museum, the High Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Atlanta, and at the Mennello Museum of American Folk Art in Orlando, Fl.

Leaving Behind is listed as not for sale in N.A.P.; his two other paintings are priced at $1600. He is represented by the Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta and can be reached at 404-815-1545.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

March 17, 2005 cover story article in Nature, "The DNA sequence of the human X chromosome," twelve pages long including charts and bibliography: co-authored by two hundred eighty two (282) people, including one "Jen S. Conquer," who Nature says is with "The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge Mass.", but which I have reason to believe is the porn pseudonym used by Technology Review editor Jason Pontin.

Friday, March 18, 2005

"Publish or perish" being the whip on the backs of common laborers in the fields of scholarship it is customary for written works to be co-authored so as to pad as many resumes as possible.

So along with R.W. Apple's expense accounts and Donald Kuspit's incomparable eight scholarly quotes in one paragraph the cover article in the March 10 issue of Nature should be donated to The Smithsonian for most co-authors of a single article.

With the sexy cover headline of "Purple Haze, Casini's Titan images in detail" the accompanying article is co-authored by:

That's thirty-six. Seven others are named in the "Acknowledgments" section at the end of the article.

There are 143 sentences in the article. Reserving the last paragraph, containing three sentences, for the seven "and others" in the acknowledgments, and employing the arithmetic tool of "division" that works out to 3.9 sentences per co-author.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

IDEAS THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO SLAP YOURSELF ON THE FOREHEAD AND GO "WOW!": CISTERNS

ABC NEWS reported on its website on March 14 of the success of a pilot project at a school in Los Angeles in using cisterns to collect rain water, thereby cutting its water bill to practically nil and raising the possibility of more widespread use of the ancient technology and, dare to dream, mitigating or ending L.A.'s, and other similar locales H2O problems permanently.

The idea came from a group called TreePeople and they convinced L.A. powers to build a 110,000 gallon underwater collection tank at Open Charter Elementary School. The ABC report says the sytem works by diverting rain water from storm drains, where it would go straight into the Pacific into the cistern where it is filtered of impurities and then hauled off by tanker trucks.

The report also noted that since half of all L.A. water usage goes to lawns a network of small cisterns located throughout the county could work ideally.

According to the report L.A. recently had a wet spell and eighty billion gallons of water was just literally flushed. A TreePeople spokesman said that when it rains just under half an inch that 3.8 billion gallons of water falls on the city. L.A. imports eighty-five percent of its water at a cost of $1 billion a year.

Monday, March 14, 2005

"The greatest novel in English of this century." So wrote someone named Walter Allen of Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo.

I had never heard of the book although I think Nostromo was the name of the spaceship in the movie Alien, the one in which Sigourney Weaver gets into her spacesuit dressed in very small panties.

Oh yes, so I bought the book based on that blurb by the immortal Mr. Allen. That's pretty high praise considering that the twentieth century produced such as Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, et al.

But query: what exactly does that mean for a book published in 1904?I assume that Mr. Allen wrote that sometime significantly after ought-four but it would be startling if he really did mean that the work eclipsed Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, A Farewell to Arms, etc.

On the other hand, if Allen wrote that tribute say, in 1915, that is almost damning by faint praise like what I used to say to a "between jobs" friend of mine that he was "one of the ten best unemployed filmmakers in all of Poughkeepsie."

Allen didn't say of the century, which could thus include most of the nineteenth, he said of this century so it had to be the twentieth. Very odd, very oddly ambiguous.

It's a fine book so far as I can tell after eighty pages but "the greatest novel in English of this [the 20th] century"????? Maybe this is why I had never heard of Walter Allen.

Hey, if you run your VCR in reverse you can make it look like Sigourney Weaver is getting undressed. Huh, how about that?

Thursday, March 10, 2005

"There is no peace anywhere where there is human life..." Another Mexico (The Lawless Roads)
Christianity, alone of the great religions, is characterized by "the divided mind, the uneasy conscience, and the sense of personal failure."
Betrayal is apparently the central theme of Greene's oeuvre. Philip Stratford who wrote the introduction to Penguin's The Portable Graham Greene gives as examples Greene's character Scobie's "triple betrayal of his wife, his profession, and his God, which leads him to the self-betrayal of suicide." (p. xi).

That is the most original, insightful description of suicide that I have ever read.

Stratford again: "the significance of betrayal [for Greene]--for betrayal isn't worthy of the name if one doesn't love what one betrays." (p. xiii)

"...when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us..." (Journey Without Maps).

That is such a powerful, poetic expression of mankind's dichotomony, the mind and the soul.

Saturday, March 05, 2005

The current issue of Artforum has a review of last year's Frankfurt exhibition of Yves Klein's work. There is a picture of the installation of Klein's blue rectangles (why not circles, ovals or triangles; why is everything in painting in parallelograms?) at the Schirn Kunsthalle.

When I was in New York a few years ago I stopped in at a gallery in Chelsea, as much to get out of the bitter February cold as anything else.

The gallery had a library of sorts and I plopped down on a chair to thaw out and picked up some of the magazines and books that they had to pass the time. A lot of them were on Yves Klein, maybe the gallery specialized in his work.

I had never heard of Yves Klein and it was there that I first saw International Klein Blue and what Klein did with it in his art.

Trying to put one's reaction to a work of art into words is almost oxymoronic. It is art's ability to go beyond the intellect and to the soul that makes it unique and language is a tool of intellect's creation. That is apologia for the following.

I was enchanted by IKB. Technically it is, the review in Artforum says, "a mixture of dry pigment and synthetic resin."

The magic of IKB is a combination of the color and it's texture. Klein hit upon a color of such complex beauty in itself that I think it would stand on its own as a creation. The viewer can get an idea of what a painting in IKB would look like from Artforum's photograph of the blue rectangles installment in the Schirn Kunsthalle.

The installation room is wonderfully constructed to show the power of the color. It is U-shaped with the base of the U squared off at ninety degrees angles. The visitor approaches the room and the eye is drawn to the U's base where, on a wall of the purest white a horizantally-oriented blue rectangle is hung. There is obvious religious symbolism here.

It is not clear to me from the photograph if the white of the walls is luminescent or if it an artifact of the camera's flash but the horizontal painting at the base of the U is surrounded by a cloud-like aurora of white.

The cloud does not obscure the horizontal painting at all and as I look at it repeatedly it appears to be a deliberate part of the installation, perhaps to give the painting, and the whole installation, an ethereal appearance. If so, that doesn't work for me. The paintings are magnetic enough without Hollywood special effects but if the cloud is the camera's artifact it's a weird, and to me, not understandable artifact.

Along each side of the U are hung two other rectangles each, these vertically oriented. The rectangles are all of identical dimension. The floor of the room is immaculate blonde hardwood.

The cloud aside, IKB's magic is apparent in this room. It is a thrilling, positive, "up" color, with some power but not aggression.

Klein took this wondrous color and not only made monochrome paintings out of it but also covered sculpture in it. There's a Venus de Milo in Klein's blue as well as a Nike of Samothrace and a Dying Slave. Klein also did facial casts of his friends and a globe in IKB.

It is in these sculptures that the other component of IKB's power, it's texture, comes through. The dry pigment absorbs light rather than reflects it and it's soft granulation transforms the sculpture much more completely than a coating of IKB paint would. The sculpture, already 3-d is recreated by a surface that is also 3-d and in this magical color also.

I don't know how seriously, or not, the art cognescenti take Klein's work but if art is quintessentially something that "moves" a viewer then it is great art to me.

Friday, March 04, 2005

It was Shaun Wright-Phillips whose shot set up Robbie Fowler's rebound putback in injury time that "crushed" Norwitch last Monday night.

Word came yesterday that "Wrighty" injured his knee sometime in the match and that X-rays revealed a tear of one of his knee tendons. Most likely he's done for the season.

With SWP gone and with Nicholas Anelka sent off to Turkey one has to wonder from whom Man City is going to get goals in its last ten matches. There's always Fowler I guess and an injury to a major star can often work psychological magic on his replacement(s) and on the whole squad but, as Norwitch's coach said following his team's catastrophe, "football is cruel." In normal circumstances City would be considered at present to be comfortably free of the relegation zone, but these are normal circumstances no longer.

You get three points for a win in English football and before the Norwitch crusher Man City manager Kevin Keegan said that City needed two more wins to secure a fourth straight season in the premiership. It's schedule is not impossible but it would have been an underdog going into most of it's remaining matches, maybe even including Monday's match at home against Bolton. Now, without SWP...

How "cruelly" ironic if the Norwitch City match knocked two teams out of the premiership.

Thursday, March 03, 2005

In 1948, Vladimir Nabakov was teaching at Cornell and gave a famous series of lectures on literature. These are the introductory words from his lecture on Charles Dickens' Bleak House, as reprinted in the Bantam Classics edition of the book:

"We are now ready to tackle Dickens.
We are now ready to embrace Dickens.
We are now ready to bask in Dickens.
In our dealings with Jane Austen we
had to make a certain effort in order
to join the ladies in the drawing room.
In the case of Dickens we remain at
table with our tawny port."

"With Dickens we expand...We just
surrender ourselves to Dickens's
voice--that is all. If it were possible
I would like to devote the fifty minutes
of every class meeting to mute medi-
tation, concentration, and admiration
of Dickens. However, my job is to
direct and rationalize those medi-
tations, that admiration. All we have
to do when reading Bleak House is to
relax and let our spines take over.
Although we read with our minds,
the seat of artistic delight is between
the shoulder blades. That little shiver
behind is quite certainly the high-
est form of emotion that humanity
has attained when evolving pure art
and pure science. Let us worship the
spine and its tingle. Let us be proud
of our being vertebrates, for we are ver-
tebrates tipped at the head with a divine
flame. The brain only continues the spine:
the wick really goes through the whole
length of the candle. If we are not capable
of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy
literature, then let us give up the whole
thing and concentrate on our comics, our
videos, our books- of-the week. But I
think Dickens will prove stronger."

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

This month's issue of Artforum is the first since the death of Susan Sontag and contains three tributes, one by Arthur Danto.

I'm going to try to keep this post from branching off into fifteen directions but I need to branch a little. This is a branch. I've never seen or heard Arthur Danto in person but he writes like such a kind, generous-spirited person. Couple of examples: the art world seems to me to be extremely harsh, critical, personal and petty. That's all I'll say on that and it's just meant to contrast some things I've read Danto write.

Danto is the champion of the seriousness, indeed the genius, of Andy Warhol. Tough sell. In one of his books he wrote that when he said that Warhol was the closest thing to a philosophical genius in art in the twentieth century, Robert Motherwell, an artist who had some formal training in philosophy, was aghast and insulted. Danto wrote that apotheosizing Warhol as such "nearly cost me Robert's friendship." Just that, nothing more but that says a lot about the things that are important to Arthur Danto: friendship, human kinship, generosity of spirit.

In his obit of Sontag, he says "we were usually happy to be in one another's company when we were on some panel together or at the same dinner," although "we were often on opposite sides of an issue."

I was not on any of those panels, nor at any of those dinners but I believe Danto to be very generous to Sontag and to their relationship in that description. But then, as if that may have sounded a bit damning by faint praise he follows that right up with the conclusion to his tribute.

"But when, in the days after her death,
people told me about their difficulties
with her ideas, I didn't want to hear about
it. As often happens with a death, we
realize what our true feelings are. I knew
from the intensity of my grief that she
was irreplaceable as only someone we love
is irreplaceable."

That speaks for itself as to Susan Sontag, and as to her friend, Arthur Danto.

One more branch. In a post a few days before I got the new issue of Artforum I wrote of Dennis Dutton's little blurb in Arts and Letters Daily on the art of Henry Darger--"Does it move anybody?"--as reminding me of the difficulty that I had with Danto's and Clement Greenberg's definitions of art, or of "good" art anyway, that their definitions missed in not giving preeminence to the emotive, soulful ability of art. People are not just brains in a vat in Descartes famous conception. We have intellect and we have a soul and the ability of art to go right by the intellect into our souls is unique. That does not happen with philosophy or with mathematics or with logic. There can be soulful bliss and beauty in those fields but the ability of art to get us right in the heart is different.

I have never read any of Susan Sontag's work but perhaps I shall after reading what Danto says of her:

"We need an erotics of art, she insisted,
rather than a hermeneutics: a way of
responding to passion with passion rather
than stifling it under the apparatus of deep
interpretation, in the manner of heavy
explainers. 'Who any longer dares confess
pleasure in the presence of art?' the art
historian James Ackerman once wrote in
a letter to me, thinking of the way works
of art were now occasions for the dispas-
sionate subjection to what his professional
colleagues called Theory. I think Sontag's
argument would have been that that cannot
be why art exists. It exists to satisfy the one set of needs that is uniquely human...
The difference between [aesthetics] and the
relation to art that Sontag exemplified and enjoined
was like the difference between sex education and
the Kama Sutra."

Just so.

I did see Susan Sontag live once, and on another occasion, of a fashion.

Several years ago I went to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. One of the exhibits I viewed was a series of five minute films he made of several of his friends. He simply kept the camera on their faces for five minutes. No script, no dialogue, just five minutes with the camera in their faces continuously. Five minutes is a LONG time in our Warholian fifteen minutes of fame culture as Warhol understood better than anyone else, and the effect was fascinating. It was a five minute psychoanalytic session.

I remember some of Warhol's friends being goofy at times, not knowing what to do for five whole minutes. Others didn't giggle or smile abruptly but seemed similarly shallow or at least not revealing of their substance.

Then there was this one of this attractive, black-haired young woman, that the camera seemed to me to reveal as the incarnation of Narcissus. That was the first and instantaneous reaction I had.

But there were other reactions, some of them contradictory with narcissism. Never was there so much activity in an inactive five minutes. The woman's eyes darted and flitted, they did not seem to want to make contact with the lens. She seemed restless, not of course, just physically BUT IN HER SOUL; distracted, but not obviously in a "serious"--a word she used a lot--way; I thought, "she was going to get her hair done or shopping when this nutty friend of hers asked her to pose for five straight minutes with a camera in her face and she's thinking "Can I go now?" It's so trite here but you could see the proverbial "wheels turning."

Afterwords, when I read in the pamphlet that the woman in was Susan Sontag I was delighted at having seen...historical footage. I didn't know what else.

The other thing that jumped out at me in the loop of her was that she was so--trite alert-- "striking." Not beautiful, but close to it; gorgeous hair, full lips, a pretty face,very soulful and deep looking, and those eyes that spoke so much and so little and of so many different things.

The photograph that Artforum usesto introduce the three eulogies to Sontag is perfect. She was forty-one at the time and dressed in a long-sleeved turtle-neck; she is lying on her back with her arms stretched out above her, her hands cradling her head. She looks in the photographer's direction but not at the camera lens, off into a world not the one she's physically in.

Reclined, her sexuality is more evident. Her lips, Angelina Jolie-luscious and inviting, her body open and ready to be pleasured (apparently not by a man of the male persuasion as I read in the three tributes). The line of her chin is nearly perfectly straight, strong but not in the least mannish. Her nose is well-proportioned to her face, her eyebrows symetrically and dramatically frame those restless eyes and at the edges that gorgeous black hair is now edged with gray.

The one time I saw Sontag live was at a symposium at N.Y.U. on David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge and his sensational claim that many Renaissance artists had used lenses to paint their humanity-defying realism. All manner of people spoke, Michael Fried, Hockney's optics collaborator Charles Falco, the head of the Met.

Apparently one of Sontag's catch-phrases, in addition to "serious," was "move one." "Move on" from interpretation, move on, or beyond, feminism, just move on. She got up at the symposium and said, "There seem to be three reactions to David Hockney's book. One, it's true and we always knew it. Two, it's not true. And three, it doesn't matter."

It was glib, pithy, funny and also flittingly dismissive. I heard in that the same narcissism that I had seen in Andy Warhol's loop, the same restlessness, the same "Can I go now?, the same "move on."

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

One of the reasons I lost my interest in sports, and it was a gradual loss over a period of several years, was the emotional involvement that I had in them. Truly, some of the best, and worst moments of my life were caused by my teams performances. I was embarassed for myself.

So gradually I withdrew, first it was the baseball season tickets to go, then the hockey, then the basketball (yeah, I had it bad), then the trips to see my alma mater play. And concommitantly my tv sports viewing dropped from--no exaggeration--about ten hours on college football Saturdays to zero. Zero. It's gotten to the point where if I am over at a house and a football game is on TV I get bored and antsy after about fifteen minutes.

I follow sports now the way that most women and some men do, I know the big events and players but not much else and I do keep track of my alma mater and my soccer team, Manchester City.

Even though I am now so far removed from fan(atic)-dom I still empathsize with my ex-fellow addicts, so Monday night's match between Man City and Norwitch brought back a lot of feelings.

Man City is mid-table in the English Premier League, Norwitch was nineteenth out of twenty teams. In English football the bottom three teams automatically get "relegated" to a lower division. There is no equivalent of it in American sports. Hard as it is to even imagine it would be like if the Tampa Bay Devil Rays finished in their customary last place and the next year found themselves playing the Toledo Mud Hens instead of the Yankees. It's devestating financially for the team and more so, I MEAN MORE SO for the fans.

Norwitch had just been promoted to the premiership this year so Monday night's match was a must-win for them to avoid a quick demotion. They were playing at home against a beatable opponent in Man City and an opponent that (1) has been erratic in its play in its own brief, three-year stay in the premiership and (2)had just sold its top goal-scorer to a Turkish club because of his own mercurial play.

The Canaries jumped on the opportunity. Inside 17 minutes they had gotten up 2-0 on Man City. 2-0 is A LOT in European soccer but before half-time City had tied it up. Norwitch had a great opportunity to retake the lead in the 71st minute but our, er, City's, goalkeeper made a great save.

The 90 minutes of regulation ended at 2-2. Soccer though adds on a few extra minutes at the end of each half to make up for delays caused by injuries and the like. The amount of time never amounts to more than 3-4 minutes but it was a few seconds too long for Norwitch.

City's best player, Shaun Wright-Phillips, took a decent shot on goal that the Norwitch keeper blocked but couldn't control and the ball bounded free. City striker Robbie Fowler was there to knock it home for the winner.

The reports of the match in the soccer press were full of those adjectives that I'd remembered and suffered through before. "Fowler Crushes Norwitch" was the headline on ESPN's Soccernet. "Norwitch Despair" was the title of Sports Illustrated Online's article. A "cruel" goal said another. It was awful. I remember, I KNOW, how the Norwitch fans felt and my heart went out to them. After I had read all the reports and got over my gape-jawed initial reaction all I could think was,

FUCK YOU, YOU CANARY BASTARDS!WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF NAME IS "CANARIES" ANYWAY?FUCK YOU, YOU TWEETY-BIRDS! GOOD LUCK IN THE COCA-COLA LEAGUE!

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